By Molly Kerridge
A music shop in Leicester is expanding its resources despite closures of other companies within the city.
Intasound, in Narborough Road, has announced that it will be expanding its business in order to accommodate more music lessons for people in the city.
Owner Alex Wright said the aim of the expansion was: “to give people, customers, more of a reason to come back to the store. You can’t expect people to come back because once they’ve got what they need they’re happy.
“To create a sense of community with our customers, and just to offer more than just selling stuff.”
The store has cleared what used to be storage rooms into new spaces for lessons to take place.
One of the old storage rooms, transformed into a new learning space on the upper floors of the building.
After the sudden closure of Music Junkie in the city centre, Intasound is the last remaining music store in wider Leicester.
Alex continued: “The key thing at the moment, in this industry, as with all retail, is there’s no profit margin to be made on new products and big name brands.
“Sadly, the shop that closed down was selling top name brands, but there’s been a bit of a crisis in our industry at the moment where there’s been investigations by a price fixing agency.
“Shops and companies have not been able to tell you what to sell something for, so it’s been a case of people selling things online for less, so when it comes to matching prices, you do all of that to make no money, and actually cost you money to keep the lights on and pay staff.”
Despite a bleak atmosphere within the industry, Intasound is able to keep providing education and accessibility to music for the city of Leicester.
Alex concluded: “It’s one more place for people to come to have lessons, there’s only a few other places in Leicester.
“At least now, there’s a place where you know the people are going to be safe, because it’s a business.
“The teachers are all checked, and you know you’re going to be getting a good service from it. It’s a bit of reliability that comes with our name, and the fact we’ve been trading for 40 years.”
